Anonymous-inspired activists are taking to the streets across the globe as the Million Mask March circles the world. Hiding behind symbolic Anonymous masks, the demonstrators are protesting censorship, government corruption, and police brutality.

Responding to a New York Post report stating that more than 300 New York City municipal employees didn’t earn enough to be able to afford a place to live, the mayor has offered to find them permanent housing.

During a press conference on Monday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted there were people working for the city that were homeless, though he disputed the number initially reported.

“What we’re facing now, this is becoming more and more of an economic problem. Meaning people have been displaced from their homes by the high cost of housing, even if they’re working,” de Blasio said at City Hall.

“We’re going to make sure in every case, particularly with working folks, that we look for every opportunity to get them to permanent housing. “

The mayor questioned whether the number of homeless city employees was over 300, with his spokeswoman Ishanee Parikh saying records showed that only 83 shelter residents have identified themselves as city employees.

Municipal union leaders told the Post, however, that the actual number is over 300, but many don’t report their employment status to shelters out of shame.

“There’s a social taboo that they believe comes with being homeless,” Joseph Puleo, president of Local 983 of District Council 37, the city’s largest blue-collar municipal-workers union, told the Post.

They are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front
of the doors of Macy’s, and panhandling outside Grand Central.
NewYork is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised
fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and
1980s.
The city’s police chief this week said that as many as 4,000
people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the
city’s ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of
denials.
Police officers have identified 80 separate homeless
encampments in the city, 20 of which are so entrenched that they have
their own furniture, while its former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has spoken
scathingly of how his successor is failing to keep order.

According to Friday’s Click 2 Houston News, a dog who was dumped at a Yonkers, N.Y., animal control when she was just a puppy, is still without a home, seven years later.

Tanya, a mastiff mix, is now pushing eight years of age, and since the time that she was just six-months-old, she has not had a family of her own. Mr. Bones & Company, a non-profit animal welfare agency in New York City, is working hard to change that for this special dog.

Mr. Bones & Company posted the following words of hope for Tanya on their Facebook page on Thursday afternoon:

The fantastic Meridith Vallillio, owner of CT K9 Services has provided Tanya with an excellent skill set for life. Tanya is beautifully trained and almost ready to go home, once and for all we can’t wait to see how this epic journey ends! Tanya will turn eight years old later this Summer. It’s her turn so please share far and wide. WE ARE MR. BONES & CO. AND WE DO NOT GIVE UP!

U.S. and Italian authorities hold a joint press conference Tuesday after the anti-mafia operation.By Claudio Lavanga and Alexander Smith

ROME – Police in Italy and the United States have broken up a major organized crime network made up of powerful mafia clans plotting to smuggle huge amounts of illegal drugs and weapons, officials said on Tuesday.

Officers on both sides of the Atlantic worked together in what they called an “unprecedented” two-year operation involving wiretaps and undercover officers penetrating deep into the heart of the alleged network, American and Italian officials said at a press conference in Rome.

Seventeen people in Italy and seven in New York were arrested in coordinated sweeps just after 7 p.m. ET on Monday. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars in cash were also recovered in the raids.

“We realized the ‘Ndrangheta wanted to create a bridge with the U.S. to move narcotics across the ocean,” U.S. magistrate Marshall Miller said, referring to the powerful criminal organization in Calabria, Italy.

According to Tuesday’s NBC New York News, an elderly, neglected dog was abandoned in the cold near a veterinary hospital in Manhattan, N.Y., on Sunday.

According to CBS New York, a security camera captured an image of the man who left the senior chow chow tied to a gate outside of a store; the dog was later retrieved and take to the Riverside Animal Hospital for care.

The abandoned 12-year-old dog is in poor condition – according to veterinarians at the hospital, the dog was emaciated, dehydrated and his coat so matted that it took hours to shave the fur away.

The dog is also confused; Georgia Weber, a veterinarian who treated the dog stated:

Then he was sitting crying in a cage here on Sunday just with me, not knowing where he was, not knowing what had happened to him,

“What he does know is he’s been abandoned.

Staff at the facility believes that the man who left the dog behind may have been at a loss over what to do with the dog, but they noted that there are much better options than what was done.

Up to a foot of snow is expected in New York City. Long Island Railroad is adding additional trains as needed, and says services may be canceled if the weather gets bad enough.

By Associated Press

January 21, 2014 10:25 a.m.

The National Weather Service forecasts wind chill as low as 10 degrees below zero.Photo: Associated Press

Updated: January 21, 2014 2:23 p.m.

(AP) — Thousands of flights were canceled, students got an extra day off from school or were being sent home early, and the federal government closed its offices in the Washington area Tuesday as another winter storm bore down on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

The National Weather Service said the storm could bring 10 to 14 inches of snow to Philadelphia and southern New England and up to a foot in New York City, to be followed by bitter cold. An arctic air mass will plunge the eastern half of the United States into a deep freeze, with wind chills as low as 40 degrees below zero, the weather service said.

It warned of heavy winds and hazardous driving conditions as the storm moved up the East Coast.

Nearly 2,200 flights were canceled and thousands more delayed Tuesday, with airports from Washington to Boston affected, according to flight-tracking site Flightaware.com. An additional 450 flights for Wednesday were already canceled.

Schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky stayed closed for an extra day after the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, or planned to send students home early. Some parents kept their kids home even if their schools were open, unwilling to put them on slippery roads.

Button up: Snowstorm over, but cold settles in

TODAY’s Al Roker and The Weather Channel managing editor Sam Champion provide a winter storm update and say temperatures are continuing to drop on the East Coast due to an “arctic express.”

By Alexander Smith and Erik Ortiz, NBC News

Anyone living east of the Rockies can expect “reinforcing shots of cold air,” said Bob Oravec, a National Weather Service forecaster.

“We’re in a pretty persistent cold pattern right now, and the biggest break we’re going to get is on Saturday — but that’s before the next cold front comes through Monday,” Oravec said.

It&amp;rsquo;s getting pretty chilly in the Orange Room as Carson Daly presents some of the best viewer-submitted snow pictures.

Expect below zero temperatures in some parts, he warned.

Temps remained below average Wednesday, forcing folks to bundle up tight while shoveling snow. Commuters had to slog through messy roads, while flights and schools were canceled.

The snowfall ended south of Boston by 4 a.m. Wednesday, according to The Weather Channel. But in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C, where the weather had caused havoc on the Tuesday evening commute, wind chills had plummeted well below zero.

The temperature in all three cities was between 9 and 12 degrees — with wind chills as low as minus-7 in Washington, D.C. Wind gusts across the region will get up to 33 mph, the National Weather Service reported.

That was hardly the worst of the cold. Fargo, N.D., was enduring wind chills of minus-38 on early Wednesday, and the air temperature in northern New England was -12 at mid-morning.

Andrew Kelly / Reuters

A woman sits on her cot at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport Tuesday.

As for snow, residents of the Northeast faced the prospect of digging themselves out of some heavy snowfall, the heaviest fell in Manalapan, N.J., which got 15.5 inches. A foot fell in New York City and 13.5 inches in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Schools across the Northeast were closed on Wednesday, although New York City had a regular school day for its 1.1 million students.

It was not only people on the ground subjected to winter misery: More than 1,400 flights coming into or out of the U.S. on Wednesday had been canceled by 11 a.m.

Cold lingers as Northeast digs out from snow

A winter storm packing snow and Arctic cold slammed the northeastern United States on Tuesday, grounding 3,000 flights, shutting down governments and schools and making travel a potential nightmare for millions. -Reuters

A squirrel stands in the snow on the National Mall January 21, 2014 in Washington, DC. A strong winter storm is bearing down on the East Coast between Virginia and Massachusetts and could dump four to eight inches of snow on the Washington area. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

People walk past a CitiBike stand during a snowstorm on January 21, 2014 in New York City. Areas of the Northeast are predicted to receive up to a foot of snow in what may be the biggest snowfall of the season so far. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

A snow blower clears a path on a pedestrian walk way during a snow storm in New York, January 22, 2014. In New York, a storm alert was issue for noon (1700 GMT) Tuesday to 6:00 am (1100 GMT) Wednesday with as much as a foot (30 centimeters) forecast for the metropolitan region. (Emmanuel Duand/AFP/Getty Images)

Governor Andrew Cuomo at the inauguration of New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio on January 1, who has set a liberal agenda. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

New York is poised to become the latest US state to relax its laws covering marijuana. Governor Andrew Cuomo will make a surprise turnaround in policy later this week, to allow limited use of the drug for medical purposes.

Cuomo, a Democrat, has always been staunchly against legalising cannabis, including for medical use. Even though the likely announcement would only loosen restrictions on the drug very slightly, it will be seen as a significant move at a time when a number of states are liberalising their laws in ways ranging from the use of medical marijuana to decriminalising basic possession of the drug, up to full recreational use. Voters in Washington state have also voted to allow recreational marijuana and it is expected to follow Colorado later this year and become the second state to implement such laws.

More than 20 states currently have laws allowing a variety of medical uses of marijuana.

Cuomo is expected to emphasise that medical marijuana will only be allowed for a tightly circumscribed list of illnesses, to be drawn up by the state Department of Health.

By announcing a unilateral executive action, the governor will sidestep the legislative process in the state capital, Albany, where the senate has repeatedly struck down bills passed in the lower assembly to permit medical marijuana.

Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told the New York Times Cuomo’s move was “bold and innovative”.

Published: December 29, 2013

Michael R. Bloomberg loves tropical fish. So when he was elected mayor, he installed two giant aquariums in City Hall.

The cost to him for having the tanks cleaned out every week for the past 12 years: around $62,400.

The mayor likes to nosh, too. So he paid to feed his staff daily a light breakfast (coffee, bagels, yogurt) and a modest lunch (tuna salad, PB&J, sliced fruit).

The bill for his entire mayoralty: about $890,000.

Mr. Bloomberg, above all, enjoys hassle-free travel. When he took his aides anywhere, from Albany to Athens, it was by private plane.

The price tag for all that jetting around: roughly $6 million.

When Mr. Bloomberg leaves office at midnight Tuesday, he will bequeath a litany of record-shattering statistics on crime reduction, sidewalk safety and skyline-altering construction. But perhaps the most staggering figure is the amount of his own money that he devoted, day in and day out, to being mayor — much of it unseen by the public.

An analysis by The New York Times shows that Mr. Bloomberg has doled out at least $650 million on a wide variety of perks and bonuses, political campaigns and advocacy work, charitable giving and social causes, not to mention travel and lodging, connected to his time and role as mayor. (His estimated tab for a multiday trip to China, with aides and security in tow: $500,000.)

In the process, he has entirely upended the financial dynamics surrounding New York’s top job.

In the past, the city paid its mayor; Mr. Bloomberg paid to be the city’s mayor.

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